The Week: “With just days left until the election, and with somewhere north of 73 million people having already voted, the president has precious little time to turn around the fortunes of his re-election campaign and the prospects of the endangered Republican Senate majority. You would think that someone interested in stumbling into a second inaugural would be doing everything he can to convince the dwindling number of persuadable voters to give him another chance. Instead, the president is bent on alienating as many voters as possible in the campaign’s closing days by flouting public health guidelines, babbling convoluted innuendo about Hunter Biden, and ignoring the increasingly desperate plight of Americans teetering on the edge of disaster.”

“It is hard to look dispassionately at this strategy and conclude anything other than that the Trump campaign is either trying to lose on purpose or is led by people who are genuinely incapable of reading polls or adjusting their strategy based on new information… This is where the standard ‘Trump could still win’ caveat would go, but it is honestly impossible to see how, absent a polling error of such magnitude that it would obliterate the industry forever. Unlike everything else Trump’s campaign is doing right now, hoping fervidly for an incredible, across-the-board polling failure at least has the virtue of not actively turning off voters he needs to win.”